


First Steps

by deceptiqueer



Series: life and death of an MTO [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, MTOs, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 17:44:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9776948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deceptiqueer/pseuds/deceptiqueer
Summary: Short freeform piece primarily focusing on an MTO's first experience with being alive. No graphic depictions of violence, but there is some mention of war and death.





	

Your very first moments alive are… quiet. And dark. A little bit cold. You are aware of your own frame, your own spark, and you feel the comforting press of EM fields around you, muzzy and complacent for now, just like yours.

Your optics come online with minimal frizzing, and in your processor is a dearth of information pre-installed before you were ever even sparked, let alone conscious. You lift your hands, feel the smooth motion of new joints, the cold still seeping out of your plating.

In your hands is a rifle.

Your audials come online shortly and then you can hear- everything. You flinch, and many of the newbuilds around you do the same. You make optic contact with one bot for a split second, and you see confusion and fear in those optics. The rumbling, rattling thrum of the ship around you is deafening, the muffled whump of explosions outside, the near-silent whirr of fresh systems surrounding you as all the other mechs in your batch are going through the _exact_ same process of becoming alive.

In your hands is a rifle, and you know how to use it. How to field strip it, clean it, reload it, aim it, fire it. Kill with it.

At your hip is a string of grenades, and you know how to use those too.

In your processor there is information- location, serial number, tactics, your chain of command, how to transform, but not how you are _able_ to transform. You are made of code written by other mechs. Everything you are was made for a purpose by other mechs.

You have no name. You have no life expectancy. You have limited knowledge of who you fight and _why_ you fight them, you only know that the blocky red badge means allies and the sharp purple badge means _kill or be killed_. All the data in your head is violently insistent of this.

You don't have time to question it. Your batch is deployed as soon as everyone’s audials and optics are functional- dropped from above directly into a warzone, and within the first few moments you watch dozens of bots just like you die. The bot you'd locked optics with for a moment is- vaporized. It's dumb luck that you don't die, too.

You're separated from command quickly, and the comms become whitenoise to you. And you are terrified. You don't want to die. You don't. You've only just- just happened into life, you don't want to die now-

You scramble to hide because you don't know what you're doing, and when somebody hostile gets close you fight tooth and claw to _survive_ and you don't have time to regret anything until later, when you remember how frightened your enemies looked too. There's no time to feel anything but the rush of fear and the need to survive. Everything happens at once, it is loud and bright and rumbling and roaring and there is smoke and the smell of burnt circuits and spilt energon, all oily and filmy in your mouth and in your vents and you feel, before you even know the concept, a powerful and desperate desire to go home. To be safe.

You make it through the first battle- uncommon, for an MTO. You make it through the next one, too. And the next. You make it through a lot of them, before _and_ after you defect, but you never, ever stop wanting to go home, wherever that is. You never forget that nameless mech who you locked optics with and who you saw offlined, moments later. You wonder what name they might have picked if they'd survived. 

When the war is "over" and you stand on Cybertron for the very first time, you don't feel anything. No recognition, no acceptance, no safety.

You don't know where home is, if it isn't Cybertron. You- they told you... everyone said this was home. This was why we fought. This was why we died.

It's not home. It leaves you with more of an ache in your spark, a heaviness in all your struts, this wild planet in need of rebuilding, a place that _nobody_ could recognize.

You wonder if it was all worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> okay so this sounds depressing. but it's not uh all bad and angsty. i swear. there's good stuff too that i am gonna put into this collection. and youll get a name for this bot too i swear


End file.
